


To Do What We Must

by hydianway



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, First War with Voldemort, Gen, Some Plot, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8174074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydianway/pseuds/hydianway
Summary: Minerva McGonagall during the first war with Voldemort.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2016) collection. 



‘We'll have to keep the school open, you know,’ said Minerva McGonagall. She was standing in the Headmaster’s office on what might’ve been the most harrowing day of her school teaching career, if not her life, to date. ‘I can only imagine what would happen if we had to send the children home,’ she continued, ‘why, there’d be a murder like this one day of every week, I’ve no doubt at all.’

‘Naturally,’ said Albus Dumbledore, looking up at her through his half-moon spectacles. His face was drawn, the lines around his eyes and mouth more pronounced than usual. He looked less, somehow, frailer. Minerva wondered for a moment whether it were a difference in perspective-- she was standing a few feet back from his desk, Dumbledore himself was sitting in the chair behind it, elbows resting in front of him on the desk in a near-perfect imitation of his usual serene manner-- but then, she thought, on balance, maybe not. ‘The question is, as ever-- how?’

‘You know how, Albus,’ she said, an urge to laugh welling up from the pool of hysteria that had until now been securely blanketed under thick layers of tiredness and grief and a consuming need to keep doing something. The answer was so simple; a man as intelligent as Dumbledore hardly needed her input to figure it out. ‘We will just have to keep it running!’

‘Of course,’ Dumbledore said, the familiar twinkle back in his eye, though it was tempered by grief and simple tiredness. ‘The easiest thing in the world.’

‘With due respect, Albus, I did _not_ say that it would be easy,’ Minerva replied, losing a little of the tight reign she always tried to keep on her wilder emotions. ‘I only meant that the how of it would be much less one of your grand plans and much more of the same small things that we have always done, and, heavens willing, always will do. ’

‘You're right, of course,’ he replied, and steepled his fingers under his chin, closing his eyes. Minerva stared at him for a moment. 

‘If that’s all, I’m off to bed,’ she said. She was, after all, very tired, and there was the possibility, however slim, that things would look slightly better by the light of the new day. At the very least, it would get her away from Albus Dumbledore's infuriating serenity.

‘Go ahead,’ Dumbledore replied. ‘I ought to do the same.’ He sighed. ‘Merlin, but I am getting much too old for this.’

‘Funny,’ said Minerva, turning with her hand poised to open the door, irritation gone as quickly as it had some, ‘for here I was at forty-four, thinking I was much too young.’

Much too young, much too inexperienced. Not ready for the battles to come.

‘That, too,’ Dumbledore said, smiling sadly. ‘Alas, we cannot choose the trials of our lifetimes, or their relative timing.’

‘No, we can’t,’ said Minerva, and opened the door, turning her back on the headmaster still sitting serenely at his desk. ‘Goodnight.’

 

\--

 

It was hard work. Minerva had never doubted it, but somehow the resolve to face it head-on that she felt in her steely-eyed, straight-backed answers to the students, the rest of the teaching staff, and even sometimes to herself in the bathroom mirror in the early morning, did not quite stand up to three days on an optimistic five hours of sleep, during which time there had been the reports of six more murders, one of them a Muggle-born student she remembers from years ago. 

There was always something that had to be done, and then after that there was something else that had to be done urgently, and then there was a tragedy, and then another thing that needed doing.

But, as Minerva had said they would, they kept the school open, and the students were safe, when within the walls of the castle if at no other time.

First she and Dumbledore had taken Filius Flitwick and Aurora Sinistra and strengthened the wards at the boundaries. At least, they had started with the intention of simply strengthening the wards, but the errand had become rather larger and more difficult in scope when it transpired that there was a rather too potentially fatal gaping hole in some of the protections in the Forbidden Forest and another in the Great Lake.

So, instead of a relatively straightforward strengthening of already very reliable enchantments, as well as the minimally difficult activation of a few of the defensive failsafes spelled into the wards some time during the eleventh or twelfth century, they had to find a way to weave thousand year old magic back into itself, seamlessly closing the gap and completing the protection once more.

Weaving the wards back together was not unlike darning, Minerva had thought, if darning could incur the risk of death, disfigurement, or an entire castle coming crashing down about one’s ears; no-one was sure to what extent the protective wards were tied to the castle itself. Still, given that they did include some small measures to ward off various insect species, as well as some of the charms groundwork for the rather creative variations on the _impervius_ charm that had been cast into the construction sometime during the school’s third upscaling, and had kept it relatively watertight ever since, they decided it would be better not to take any chances.  

Then there was the question of who it had been who had ripped the holes in the wards to begin with, and how they had done it, and what could be done in order for it not to happen again. As complicated as the wards had been, this was harder; nobody much wanted to think about the possibility of someone inside the castle trying to help the Death Eaters, and even less did they know about how to go about discovering who it was in the first place.

While all this was happening, she and the other Heads of Houses had drawn up a list of more mundane safety measures to be imposed on the students, and had spent a week or more listening to the obligatory moaning about the cancellation of all Hogsmeade weekends until further notice, as well as the equally obligatory attempted curfew-dodgers, who seemed to be getting more inept at actually dodging _anything,_ much less teachers,  year by year.

Although, Minerva might have to admit to having somewhat skewed expectations in that area due to her recent seven years as Head of a Gryffindor House which had been home to the most unerringly difficult to catch late night wanderers the castle had seen since perhaps Augusta Longbottom had managed to get all of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff houses into the edges of the Forbidden Forest for a midnight feast and then back again, completely undetected.

As she was only a few years free of James Potter and his gang, Minerva had allowed herself one small moment to be very glad that the four of them were somewhere far, far away from Hogwarts, hopefully causing as much trouble for the Death Eaters as they used to cause for her. Then she had gone about chivvying the tiny, terrified-looking group of third years she’d caught trying to get into the kitchens back to their dormitories, and turned in for the night herself.

Between this, the spying duties she had taken on for the Ministry of Magic, and various researches on Hogwarts castle and the nature of its protections (dull, but often rewarding in the most unexpected of ways-- for example, Minerva had unearthed a book of notes on the castle which had been left apparently untouched somewhere behind the restricted section for the past three hundred years, and discovered that not only did the hundreds of suits of armour that populated Hogwarts’s corridors serve an actual purpose, that purpose was to repel invaders from the school by force if instructed to do so, which, even though it was her dearest and most devout wish that the castle itself never be endangered enough to require such measured be enacted, Minerva thought was really, really, quite fantastic) a year passed.  


\---  


Dumbledore at some stage in the first months of 1981 had started disappearing for longer and longer stretches of time-- she thought it was to London, although she did gather from some hints dropped in correspondence that he might have been travelling on the continent as well-- leaving in Minerva’s hands the running of the school on top of her teaching obligations and spy duties.

The pattern of Death Eater activities had become much harder to predict within this same period, and much more public-- they seemed to be in the habit of picking their victims at random and killing them with a certain obvious degree of sadism, then casting that great, ghastly skull over the bodies as if to put them on show.

They were trying to make people afraid, Dumbledore had said, and Minerva agreed, though part of her thought that many of them simply enjoyed the thrill of killing without fear of consequence. This was borne out by the things Minerva heard whilst spying on their meetings in the form of a tabby cat; for example, Bellatrix Lestrange laughing as one of her compatriots described how a Muggle woman he was torturing had screamed as she killed her husband and children in front of her. All in all, her eavesdropping sessions on Death Eater meetings provided as many rather chilling glimpses into the depths of the human capacity for cruelty as they did useful information, and Minerva was getting rather weary of the whole brutal, terrifying business.

The Aurors, and, she knew, the Order of the Phoenix, were keeping an eye on the Death Eaters they judged to be the most dangerous, the ones who would as likely murder a streetful of Muggles as they would use magic to heat up a cup of water, and they had set up systems of Patronus relays, so that when such an emergency arose, they would be able to summon as many people as they needed to the scene with greatest possible expediency.

Although by September 1981 the relay system had been in place for several months and there had been a few relatively major Death Eater attacks during that time, Minerva was far enough down the list that she herself had never been called to the aid of the Ministry of Magic.

Of course, it had only ever been a question of when and not if it would happen, so Minerva was shocked but not unduly so when the Patronus appeared at the front of her classroom just as she was starting to tell her third year Transfiguration students about Animagi. It was a fox, belonging to one of the younger Aurors she had met in the course of her dealings with the Ministry of Magic.

‘Trafalgar Square,’ said the Patronus, ‘come quickly.’ And it vanished in a flicker of silvery air.

Her students were looking at the place where it had stood in abject astonishment, but Minerva was already moving for the door.

‘There’s been a Death Eater attack in London,’ Minerva said, stopping briefly to address them on her way out of the classroom. ‘Stay where you are, you’ll be quite safe here.’

Once outside the classroom, she broke into a run, cast a quick _accio_ to summon her broom from her rooms, and set off for the apparition boundaries of the school as fast as she could.

Minerva Apparated across nearly the length of the whole island, and arrived in London, out of breath and disoriented, to a scene of utter chaos. Traffic had stopped all around, and people were running for the safety of the buildings that surrounded the square. Minerva could see, sickeningly, as some of these people were cut down in their paths by the black hooded figures standing still and hideous in the midst of the chaos, on the north wall around the base of Nelson’s column, blasting great, destructive jets of lights from their wands, killing and maiming and sending chunks of paving stone flying.

There were witches and wizards firing back at them from the relative shelter of the stopped cars around the edge, and several people Minerva recognised from the few Order of the Phoenix meetings she had attended up on brooms, swooping in to fire on the Death Eaters and swooping out of range and into the glare protective of the sun as quickly as they had arrived.

Minerva looked around, trying to decide where she could be most helpful. There were groups of witches and wizards trying to direct frightened Muggles to shelter, and Minerva sprinted over to the melee in front of the nearest group over join them, drawing the attention of the Death Eaters and providing cover for their retreat.

This quickly turned into Minerva taking on three Death Eater opponents at once, having clearly  Minerva was a very good duellist, she knew, although she was somewhat out of practice, but it took all of her skill to hold her own in a match like this, when there was dust in the air and noise and chaos and human bodies strewn on the ground around her, and it was something of a shock a shock when her first Death Eater went down, victim of a stunner to the chest after a simple stinging hex to the hand which had cursed him to drop his wand. Her next two opponents-- who earned no respect from Minerva when they spared their fallen fellow not a glance-- were trickier, but between her and a middle-aged Auror she didn’t recognise who leapt into the fray, they managed to put one in a full body-bind and send the other Disapparating across the square.

The chaos of the fight seemed to last simultaneously a mere instant and a long, panic-filled eternity, and looking back, Minerva could hardly have told you which way was up and which down. All she knew was that she had to make sure no-one died who she could save, and that the Death Eaters had to be driven away or incapacitated.

She could not tell you how it ended, only that one moment she was behind a car shooting jinxes at a tall Death Eater, vicious and wickedly fast with his wand, other duels still visible out of the corner of her eye, and the next there was nothing but leftover carnage and settling dust.

There was silence in the square for several moments, everyone present simply taking it all in. The fountains had been all but demolished, and there was water spewing everywhere from a burst pipe. Nelson had come off the top of his column, which was as chipped and broken as the paving in the rest of the square. Cars were overturned, windscreens smashed, on fire, trees were uprooted, and everywhere you looked there were people lying on the grounded, wounded or dead or simply stunned, and Death Eaters that needed arresting before they came to or recovered the use of their limbs.

Silence, shock, and then the call to action. There was twice as much to be done now as their was during the fight: healing the wounded, identifying the dead, trying to repair the damage to the square. The Muggles who had been in the square and in the surrounding buildings would have to be taken to the Ministry for Obliviation.

Someone moaned from a short distance to Minerva’s left, and she moved quickly over to the woman’s side, trying to assess her for injuries and calling for someone with Healer training to come and help. A young witch with unruly black hair and ripped, dusty clothing, as well as some rather nasty looking bruising down the side of her face appeared a few seconds later, and she smiled at Minerva before instructing her as to what to do for the injured person lying between them.

Soon the clean-up effort was more organised, and trained Healers from St Mungos appeared on the scene. The dead and wounded were carried away, and those still able worked in groups to repair the broken fountains, levitate Nelson’s column back together and setting the broken cars to rights upon the roads. The clean up took hours, and required all of Minerva’s remaining reserves and then some. Still, she did not stop, and nor did the people around her, until it almost looked as if nothing had ever happened there at all.

 _Magic_ , Minerva thought, smiled grimly at her brothers and sisters in arms, embraced the young witch-- Patricia was her name-- who had worked alongside her for the most harrowing hours of the clean-up and reconstruction effort, and Apparated back to Hogsmeade without another word. Once there, she picked up her broom, flew back to her quarters at the school, stripped off her filthy, ruined clothing, taken a very quick, very hot bath, and collapsed into bed.

 

\---

  
The next morning, Minerva got up at her usual time and prepared to teach, to address the school over breakfast and reassure them of their safety. As ever, Minerva thought, she did what she had to do. And this was, after all, what she did best.

**Author's Note:**

> right! so, this fic includes both my first effort to imagine what the first war against Voldemort would actually have looked like and how it would have been fought, and my first effort to write anything approaching an action scene, so hopefully it's worked out alright!! otherwise, I hope you found something else to enjoy in the fic; Minerva McGonagall is one of my favourite characters from HP and I did try my best to do her justice.


End file.
